Sendwithus is Upgrading to Jinja

Brad Van Vugt | July 26, 2014

TL;DR – We’re switching to Jinja Templating. This won’t affect your existing templates and promises great new features to come. =]

Jinja Templating Engine

Since the beginning, Sendwithus has used the Django Templating Language to power your email templates. This decision came with a lot of advantages; Django Templating is well documented, easy to use, and easy to develop for.

However, we’ve grown rapidly over the last few months and we’ve met some great customers along the way that want to do new and interesting things with their templates. We’re really excited to build these features and provide the experience our customers want. For these reasons, we’ve decided to upgrade to the Jinja Templating Language. This upgrade will allow for some really interesting features down the road and greatly improve the performance of our platform.

Rest assured, we will continue to support Django templates as long as is required.

We will never force you to upgrade to Jinja on your own. If you want to upgrade your templates we’ll work closely with your team to make it a quick and painless process. We’ll outline the reasons for this change below and if you have any questions or concerns please contact us at us@sendwithus.com.

How does this affect customers?

As mentioned above, no customer action is required and we will take every precaution necessary to ensure your email templates and content remain unaffected.

If you’re already a customer…

This change won’t affect your templates in any way. Your existing templates (and any new ones you create) will continue to render and send using Django Template syntax. If you’d like to upgrade to Jinja, please email us and we’ll help you out.

Why is Sendwithus upgrading to Jinja?

We’ll make another blog post with all the big juicy nerd details soon, but here are the primary reasons we chose Jinja…

Jinja is based on Django.

Jinja is inspired by Django’s templating syntax. So chances are you won’t even notice the change. In fact it’s likely your templates already work and look amazing with Jinja.

Jinja is highly extensible.

This means we can build new and interesting editor and templating features. Examples include strict syntax checking, default values, and assisted variable editing, just to name a few that we’re excited about.

Jinja is fast.

We’ve nearly quadrupled our email throughput in the last six months. This growth comes with serious performance requirements; rendering millions of emails in real-time is no easy task and Jinja will help us scale seamlessly.

When will this happen?

Effective today, new Sendwithus accounts will use Jinja by default. Existing customers will continue to use Django. Over the coming weeks we’ll be working with existing customers to ensure a safe and seamless upgrade.

Update, 2014-08-12: We’ll be moving all customers with Jinja-compatible templates over to Jinja rendering on Friday, August 15th. These customers will be contacted and provided any instructions required for the switch — however in almost all cases no action will be required and the transition will be seamless. Our team will closely monitor all outgoing emails to ensure there are no issues.